Ulysses

On a single day, 16 June 1904, two men walk through Dublin. Stephen Dedalus, a young teacher and would-be writer, the hero of Joyce's earlier novel, broods on his dead mother and on art; Leopold Bloom, a Jewish advertising salesman, makes breakfast, goes to a funeral, visits a newspaper office, a library, a pub and a beach, avoids going home because he knows his wife Molly is meeting her lover, and late at night takes the drunken Stephen under his wing. Each of the eighteen episodes is written in a different style and matches an episode of Homer's Odyssey, and the book ends with Molly's unpunctuated monologue, closing 'yes I said yes I will Yes'.

James Joyce published Ulysses in Paris in 1922; it was banned for obscenity in the United States until 1933. It is difficult, and a chapter guide helps, but it is also very funny and humane. Admirers celebrate 'Bloomsday' every 16 June. Read A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man first to meet Stephen.

James Joyce (1882–1941) was born in Dublin, educated by the Jesuits, and left Ireland in 1904 with Nora Barnacle, never to live there again. They lived in Trieste, Zurich and Paris, where he taught English and struggled with poverty and failing eyesight, while writing almost entirely about the city he had left.

Dubliners and A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man were followed by Ulysses, published in Paris in 1922 and banned for years in Britain and America, and by the even more experimental Finnegans Wake. He changed what a novel could be.